GAUVIN: Local airport has big eyes for the future of biz drones

Friday

Jan 24, 2014 at 2:00 AM

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!

Paul Gauvin

JUST IMAGINE…

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman! No, wait a minute, it’s just another red and blue drone with a big “S” on its chest, you know, one of those unmanned flying trucks from Standard Shipping Co. at Barnstable Airport.

With the announcement that Otis Air Base, a/k/a Joint Base Cape Cod, will become a testing site for unmanned commercial aircraft, came some flights of fancy that remind one of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Birds” movie, where the sky is just so full of feathered furies that not a single car or pedestrian goes un-pooped, or as Dr. Seuss might put it, The Splat on the Hat.

Nonetheless, the news has Roland “Bud” Breault, manager of Barnstable Municipal Airport, on high alert. “What I am hoping is that the project in and of itself will generate other aviation-type spinoff work that we may be able to ‘capture’ here at Barnstable as we continue to try and develop other streams of revenue.”

Imagine what Christmas might be like when squadrons of low-flying drones race above us by the thousands trying to make delivery by midnight so that no tyke – except maybe the exceptionally poor ones (some things never change) – will go without a Christmas toy. That was the case back in the stone age of 2013 when the optimistic but not-so-amazonian Amazon on-line retailer could not keep all its promises to deliver on time. That’s what life was like without drones on the job. Unbearably undeliverable.

If we want an impartial look at the peaceful possibilities of “drones’’ servicing mankind’s exalted visions, we evidently need to clear up what manufacturer General Atomics Aeronautical Systems calls the pejorative (derogatory) connotation of the word “drone,” which refers to a stingless male bee. Like, what’s pejorative about a stingless, hence harmless, bee?

Seems the other names applied to drones, by the manufacturer no less, are what give unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) a negative connotation: One name is “Reaper,” called the world’s deadliest drone by those on the receiving end, and therefore grim; “Predator” is another drone name meaning marauder, pillager, raider. Another is “Avenger,” a retaliator or punisher. Names of impending violence used by a company that considers an unarmed bee pejorative. Go figure.

Want an improved connotation? Try “Savior 2” or “Angel 3” or some such word esteemed by mankind. Even calling a UAV “unmanned” is misleading. The U.S. Air Force, for whom most UAVs are manufactured at about $17 million a pop of your tax dollars or China’s borrowed money, is more precise in naming things. They call a drone an RPVA (Remotely Piloted Vehicle/Aircraft), which is about as precise as a smart bomb.

It doesn’t help to watch the military Reaper do its work in TV footage, unleashing a missile on an enemy’s car caravan in some far-off place and blowing it and objects around it – like civilian kids maybe - to kingdom come. That connotes a bad rap, yes? Then there’s whistleblower Edward Snowjob’s 1.7 million stolen revelations about NSA’s big ears in our bedrooms spooking the ACLU into acting like a frightened nanny once again and spreading a case of mass paranoia about drones that does nothing but impede scientific progress.

Nobody said getting from the Flintstones to the Jetsons was going to be easy, just like having to go through the politics of Obamacare to yield a working Affordable Care Act or a civil war to yield a United States.

Picture, instead, an improved drone emblazoned with a Red Cross swiftly flying cases of a life-saving serum to a remote village anywhere or helping scour the Atlantic for survivors of a fishing boat accident, and the word “drone” becomes sublime. That’s what the American public needs to be sold on: The future of drones as a helpful purveyor of goodness – as well as a soldier of war.

The optimist sees the glass as half-full, the pessimist as half empty while the pragmatist sees the need for a smaller glass, yes? Better that a practical Cape Cod accept the potential of commercial droning in its skies than wimp out because somebody says they could be used as peeping toms.

Breault isn’t ignoring the cutting-edge possibilities for Barnstable Municipal Airport should drones, now confined to restricted air space for testing, eventually be integrated into unrestricted air space and used commercially, perhaps as soon as 2016. The airport could provide flight operation-type services when drones become part of daily life, Breault imagines.

There are already one on-line and two brick-and-mortar colleges offering bachelor and advanced degrees in droning (piloting, engineering, photography, etc.). There is Phoenix-based on-line Unmanned Vehicle University and the universities of North Dakota and Kansas.

A recent state study found that Barnstable Municipal Airport and its tenants provide more than 2,246 jobs to the region, annual wages and benefits exceeding $74 million and annual goods and services of more than $227 million. And best of all, it’s self-supporting as far as the local tax rate is concerned.